Across all experiments, both age groups appeared to rely on pre-existing item-based knowledge for the familiar items to the same extent, suggesting no age-related decrement in the use of prior knowledge. Moreover, the result showed that item-specific knowledge for the unfamiliar items develops over the course of the experiment. This became apparent in cases when the distribution of target item sizes was bimodal, as this made session-based learning of the item statistics easier to observe; this experiment-based knowledge/ learning was again equivalent for both age groups. The older adults, however, consistently demonstrated greater reconstruction variability and overall error. I interpreted this as evidence of noisier memory representations of the studied items for the older adults (e.g. Noack, Lovden & Lindenberger, 2014); the findings suggest that this increase in error does not lead to more knowledge-based bias in older adults.